The 2009 Great Backyard Bird Count (GBBC) starts this Friday, February 13 and will run through Monday, February 16.

The GBBC is an annual four-day event during which bird watchers of all ages count birds, creating a snapshot image of bird populations across North America and make it as green steps.

These green steps are free, fun, easy, and open to all ages and levels of bird-watching expertise. You can count for as a little as 15 minutes on one day, or you can count as long as you like on each day of the event. All you have to do is fill out an online checklist at the Great Backyard Bird Count website.

Last year, participants submitted more than 85,000 checklists and reported more than 9.8 million birds of 635 species. As the count progresses, you can go to the website to follow what is being reported and see how the 2009 numbers compare to previous years.

The GBBC is a joint project of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Audubon.

If you have a backyard, or homestead and you are troubled by unwanted bugs around your garden, animals and humans, and if you are reluctant to spray pesticides, poultry might be the answer for you.

Poultry are easy to care for, provide delicious eggs, and their droppings add excellent nutrients to your compost pile. They are also entertaining to watch.

Another advantage of poultry is that they do an outstanding job controlling ticks, mosquitos and other pests.

In the June/July 2009 issue of MotherEarthNews, the editors collected many stories on how chickens, ducks and guineas help to decrease the number of bugs around peoples yards.

Chickens are the most common poultry people raise in their backyard. They eat almost everything that moves: ticks, fly larvae, grasshoppers, scorpions, centipedes, blackwidow spiders, crickets, and even small snakes.

Ducks not only manage pond pests, they are also tireless consumers of slugs, snails, beetles, and grasshoppers. They are great at controlling mosquitoes, snakes, wasps, termites and hornets.

Guineas are good pest controllers too. They are a good addition to your flock. They are more alert and often warn ranging chickens of overhead predators. They won’t disturb your vegetables when you put them in your garden.

For more amazing and amusing stories on poultry pest control, go to www.MotherEarthNews.com/eggs/pestpatrol.aspx

Also see “Organic Pest Control (2) — Beneficial Insects”.

Straw, manure and composmat are gardener’s friends for a healthy and productive garden. But do you know that they could also kill your lettuce, tomatoes, beans and peas?

The culprit is the widely used herbicide aminopyralid, an active ingredient in Milestone and Forefront.

This herbicide, as well as some others that belong to the same class of chemicals (such as clopyralid) developed and sold by DowAgroscience, was widely used on pastures with horses and cattle to control perennial weeds.

Although it was claimed that the herbicide should degrade within days, it has been found to persist for years. It passes through animals feeding on treated grass or hay.

Previously treated straw, well rotten manure from animals feeding on sprayed grass, or even compost converted from contaminated source may carry enough plant killer to kill your sensitive plants and harm the others.

To keep your garden save, ask questions before buying manure or compost.

To learn more about the problem and see what the company DowAgroscience, the EPA and the government have or have not done to control the problem, read this and this.

Habitat Suites

When you are thinking about having an eco-tourism journey, be ready to rest your body inside an eco-friendly hotel. 1000 Green Steps recommend Habitat Suites Hotel as the most eco-friendly hotel in Texas considering ‘green’ features they offer to their customers. Those features include:

• They are solar-powered
• Grounds maintained with the use of natural, nontoxic fertilizers and pesticides
• Nontoxic, phosphate-free, natural cleansers used in cleaning
• Air ozonators/ionizers used for clean air quality in suites
• Biodegradable, recycled, unbleached paper products/recycling program
• Ladybugs populate our grounds, fostering healthy plants, the natural, chemical-free way
• About 20% of our energy needs are satisfied by our on-site 18 Kilowatt 108 solar panel PV (photo-voltaic) system

By those features 1000 Green Steps believe that they have good reasons to make Habitat Suites win awards and the latest was in 2006 they received the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce first ever environmental award, the “Greenbelt Award” and 2007 got us another “Greenbelt Award”

Room Rate starting from $137/night

Happy Green Living!

Best Buy has announced that it will launch an electronics recycling program at all of its U.S. stores beginning on February 15 as their green steps program.

Consumers can bring up to two items per day, per household, to any Best Buy store.

Best Buy will accept most consumer electronics, including:

• televisions and monitors up to 32″

• computers CPUs and notebooks

• small electronics

• VCR and DVD players

• phones

• accessories, such as keyboards, mice, and remotes

You’ll be charged a $10 recycling fee per unit for items with screens, such as televisions, laptop computers, and monitors. But, then you’ll instantly receive a $10 Best Buy gift card in exchange for the recycling fee. (This fee does not apply for units recycled in California stores, and does not apply for any of Best Buy’s Exclusive-Branded products, such as Insignia, Dynex, and VPR Matrix.) Read more »

Although traditional concrete is a durable building material for patios, driveways and roads, like other Impermeable materials used in constructions, it prevents rain, snow and other surface water from seeping into the ground, which contributes to the decreasing level of groundwater.

Runoff water may cause floods and carry toxic pollutants into streams. Depletion of ground water may endanger certain plants and trees.

Fortunately, alternative permeable materials are available which permit water to drain into the ground.

A couple of the options are permeable pavers for patios, walkways or driveways, and open-cell concrete blocks for driveways or parking area.

Permeable pavers are solid, but allow water to drain if spaced properly. Open-cell concrete blocks are open enough in their structure to allow water through, while still strong enough to support vehicles. Spaces can be filled with gravel, sand or grass.

Another option is pervious concrete. It contains a lot of open spaces for water to flow through.

Two other choices are Gravelpave2 and Grasspave2 for parking area and driveways. They have a ring-and-grid structure resting on a porous base of sand or gravel for drainage.

Next time you build a driveway, a parking space or a patio, choose one of these eco-friendly products.

Useful websites: www.perviouspavement.org   www.paversearch.com   www.invisiblestructures.com 

For the original article on the subject, click here.

When you see some bugs chewing on your veggies in the garden, don’t panic. Before you invest in pesticides, consider beneficial insects — the “good bugs”.

There are many different beneficial bugs, such as lacewing flies, lady bugs, ground beetles, syrphid flies, trichogramma wasps, etc.

These good bugs prey on a variety of common pest insects, including aphids, spider mites, sweet corn earworms, cutworms, grasshopper eggs, cabbageworms, etc, etc.

Many of the good bugs do their pest control work while they are larvae rather than in adult form, when they feed mostly on nectar and pollen from flowers.

To attract beneficial insects to your garden, plant flowers and plants that provide shelter and food to them.

Plants that provide a suitable environment for good bugs include, but not limited to, Alyssum, Marigolds, Clover, Coriander, Fennel, Yarrow, etc.

You can purchase many of the beneficial insects from nurseries or catalogues. But you will still want to provide them with the right plants for them to stay and establish in your garden.

Read more, check out this website as well as this one.

Also see “Organic Pest Control (1) — Poultry”.

Chemical fertilizers have been used to increase yields for many years in the U.S. and around the world. But more and more controversy has been raised in recent years.

Chemical fertilizers feed plants directly, bypassing and weakening the soil’s digestive system (worms, bacteria, etc). Eventually, the soil loses its ability to digest nutrition and becomes sterile.

Excessive chemical fertilizers applied can get into water systems and pollute our environment.

There is a significant amount of waste and energy expenditure associated with the production and transportation of chemical fertilizers.

On the other hand, organic fertilizers preserve and enrich the soil. They are slightly less effective in the short term since they need to be broken down by micro-organisms and earthworms before plants can utilize them. In the long run, however, they improve the overall health of the farmland or garden soil.

Organic fertilizers also save the energy that we now use to produce chemical fertilizers by allowing the soil’s digestive system to do its work.

Roundup (glyphosate) is the most widely used herbicide in the world. Farmers spray millions of acres of crops using glyphosate each year. People also use it on their lawn and garden.

Monsanto, the manufacturer of Roundup, claims that the weedkiller is safe. But recent scientific studies have shown evidence that glyphosate is harmful to animal and human health.

Human placental cells are very sensitive to glyphosate at a very low concentration (lower than the agricultural use). The weedkiller also disrupts human sex hormone.

Exposure to glyphosate may cause eye and skin irritation, nausea, sore throat, headache, difficulty breathing and lethargy. It causes genetic damages to human and animal cells in a lab setting.

Studies also link the exposure of glyphosate to greater risks of cancer, miscarriages and attention deficit disorder.

This weedkiller can easily contaminate streams. It causes genetic damages and harm the immune system in fish and frogs.

Roundup also make a variety of plant diseases more severe.

It is important for the health and for the environment that we find alternatives to herbicides and pesticides.

To read a more detailed report on Roundup, click here.

Baltimore Sun photo by Chiaki Kawajiri / 12- 23-08

Bluehouse, an eco-friendly home furnishings store, has installed a large floor-to-ceiling green wall at its newest location in the Kenilworth mall in Towson, MD as their green steps.

According to an article in the Baltimore Sun, the 16′x33′ structure is comprised of 15,000 individual plants and represents an up-and-coming trend in environmental design.

Read more »